To the contrary: I’m sure all the developers worked very hard, and very competently.

It sounds like classic mismanagement. Some artists making this being told that there will be some automatic culling or LOD system so to go wild - it won’t affect the end result; and the system not being ready or being cut by another part of the organisation without the artists ever knowing about it.

I’m sure there were vocal developers who understood the problems and advocated for fixing - but a decision was made to release anyway; I can’t even say wrongly, because games being half-finished on release and polished later is not at all unusual nowadays even for flagship titles; and they do have a track record of supporting their titles for a long time.

I can well imagine a reasonable decision to get money coming in now for the cost of a couple of months of low level complaints that nobody will remember in a year.

It sucks, but I am willing to bet it’s not laziness or people being bad at their jobs.

My humble experience is that this scale of duckup is unachievable from line workers being bad at their jobs.

It is easily achievable from bad/misaligned incentives, poor leadership, no product vision and probably a dozen other organisation problems which make decent workers working on stuff that actively makes the end product worse. Think Boeing 737 Max.

Now that's a bit harsh. You don't know what is going on inside that company, and under what environment the development happened.

This all could easily stem from a couple of key people leaving and chaos breaking loose, or from extreme time pressure by the publishers.

The default assumption is that the studio is not particularly different from the norm of the industry, unless proven to be otherwise.

Colossal Order has about 40 employees, even though they are AAA. Here - proven otherwise.

> even though they are AAA

Says who?

They have a large publisher (Paradox Interactive) who prescribes their schedules. They also made bet bookings from Cities: Skylines that put them quite evidently in AAA. Finally, they release the games for all major platforms. All together, this describes a AAA game developer.

In contrast, an AA developer would work with publishers like Annapurna Interactive, Devolver Digital or Team 17, while a III game would have a much smaller scope - like The Witness, The Stanley Parable, or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. It is clear that Colossal Order doesn’t work with a small publisher or make games of indie scope.

If you were just sealioning, don’t do that please.

I think going by eg https://www.gameopedia.com/indie-aaa-aa-games-comparison/ they are "AA".

That’s a very good resource, nice find! I think we can agree CO is between AA and AAA. I think it leans much more on the AAA side from my industry experience, but arguments could be made that it’s not all the way there and that therefore it’s AA. But this is a bit semantic. They make AAA money and have AAA standards and marketing. And that’s a bit unusual for 40 people, of which 10 are probably admin and 30 are dev.

Those don't seem to be strong reasons for categorizing Colossal Order as a AAA studio?

And what is 'sealioning'?

Lmao. This is often how everything seems from the outside, but the inside story is something else. Probably just too much work, not enough time.